Slashdot Mirror
Facebook's WhatsApp Has an Encrypted Child Porn Problem (techcrunch.com)
Videos and pictures of children being subjected to sexual abuse are being openly shared on Facebook's WhatsApp on a vast scale, with the encrypted messaging service failing to curb the problem despite banning thousands of accounts every day. From a report: Without the necessary number of human moderators, the disturbing content is slipping by WhatsApp's automated systems. A report reviewed by TechCrunch from two Israeli NGOs details how third-party apps for discovering WhatsApp groups include "Adult" sections that offer invite links to join rings of users trading images of child exploitation. TechCrunch has reviewed materials showing many of these groups are currently active.
TechCrunch's investigation shows that Facebook could do more to police WhatsApp and remove this kind of content. Even without technical solutions that would require a weakening of encryption, WhatsApp's moderators should have been able to find these groups and put a stop to them. Groups with names like "child porn only no adv" and "child porn xvideos" found on the group discovery app "Group Links For Whats" by Lisa Studio don't even attempt to hide their nature.
Better manual investigation of these group discovery apps and WhatsApp itself should have immediately led these groups to be deleted and their members banned. While Facebook doubled its moderation staff from 10,000 to 20,000 in 2018 to crack down on election interference, bullying, and other policy violations, that staff does not moderate WhatsApp content. With just 300 employees, WhatsApp runs semi-independently, and the company confirms it handles its own moderation efforts. That's proving inadequate for policing at 1.5 billion user community. It's a similar problem that WhatsApp, used by more than a billion users, is facing in developing markets where its service is being used to spread false information.
TechCrunch's investigation shows that Facebook could do more to police WhatsApp and remove this kind of content. Even without technical solutions that would require a weakening of encryption, WhatsApp's moderators should have been able to find these groups and put a stop to them. Groups with names like "child porn only no adv" and "child porn xvideos" found on the group discovery app "Group Links For Whats" by Lisa Studio don't even attempt to hide their nature.
Better manual investigation of these group discovery apps and WhatsApp itself should have immediately led these groups to be deleted and their members banned. While Facebook doubled its moderation staff from 10,000 to 20,000 in 2018 to crack down on election interference, bullying, and other policy violations, that staff does not moderate WhatsApp content. With just 300 employees, WhatsApp runs semi-independently, and the company confirms it handles its own moderation efforts. That's proving inadequate for policing at 1.5 billion user community. It's a similar problem that WhatsApp, used by more than a billion users, is facing in developing markets where its service is being used to spread false information.
Uh, hang on a cotton-pickin' second. Isn't WhatsApp supposed to have "end to end encryption?" Didn't they like publish a whole paper describing how their end-to-end encryption made it impossible for third parties to know the content that was being sent? Wasn't it supposed to be impossible for anyone, including WhatsApp themselves, to know the content being transmitted on their system?
Doesn't end-to-end encryption, where "even WhatsApp" can't see the contents of the messages, sorta preclude the use of moderators to moderate content? That is, if WhatsApp can't see the messages, they can't moderate the messages, right?
So, um, am I wrong in thinking that WhatsApp's claim to being able to moderate messages and claims that messages cannot be read by WhatsApp are sort of incompatible? Unless WhatsApp's supposed "end-to-end encryption" is more of a bullshit marketing ploy rather than a description of the actual algorithms in play here...
Because the object of the article is to vilify encryption so the public demands that it be outlawed. It's a pretty old trick
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”